Extended Article
“Life and Adaptation” by Victor Sinow
Fall 2024 Column
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim
Blessings of fulfillment and plenty with the coming of the Fall season! In this edition of the Insight “Science and Spirituality” column, I would like to introduce a fascinating new mathematical formulation of the Second Law of thermodynamics that echoes the wisdom and teachings of Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr. Ali Kianfar.
The Second Law of thermodynamics is an important and widely quoted scientific principle. It establishes the concept of entropy as a physical property. Entropy can be thought of as a quantitative measure of the amount of disorder or randomness associated with any given system. As the Second Law holds, in the spontaneous evolution of a thermally closed system, the entropy of that system can never decrease and it attains its maximum value at equilibrium.[1] A few simple examples of physical phenomenon that the Second Law predicts are (1) a hot liquid cooling to room temperature, (2) a gas filling an available volume with equal pressure, and (3) vinegar and oil separating. All of these examples show how systems, left to evolve without intervention, tend towards their lowest energy (highest entropy) states.
Life, as we know and understand it from a scientific perspective, is a highly ordered and energetic state of matter. How then, as is often asked, could life have evolved here on Earth without violating the Second Law of thermodynamics? Surely 4.5 billion years of Earth’s existence has been long enough to allow the proverbial coffee cup to cool down and reach thermal equilibrium, thereby maximizing the entropy of the Earth system. And yet, as we know, life thrives and abounds in infinite variety all around us. Our existence is seemingly a profound contradiction to one of our most venerable scientific laws.
From a spiritual perspective, the spontaneous formation and existence of life is not a contradiction, but a requirement of the universe. As Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr. Ali Kianfar teaches, since the dawn of time, the universe has evolved based on the Knowledge of Quran. That Knowledge, contained in the light of creation and shining forth from the cradle of nothingness, sets forth the rules of motion in the physical dimension. All states of matter and energy, including the human body, are a consequence of those rules and manifestations of God’s mercy and grace. Countless reflections and transmissions of the light of creation, following the rules of motion, have brought forth the body and suffused it with the gift of life. Its existence, and the existence of all life, is inevitable.
Recently, new ideas regarding the Second Law of thermodynamics have begun to support the origin of life as taught by Shah Kianfar. Jeremy English, a professor from MIT, has come up with a new mathematical formulation of the Second Law with a powerful resulting intuition: molecules that are exposed to a constant driving source of energy will tend to self-organize into structures that are best suited to resonate with and dissipate that energy source. Thus, according to Professor English, “while any given change in shape for a system is mostly random, the most durable and irreversible of these shifts in configuration occur when the system happens to be momentarily better at absorbing and dissipating energy. With the passage of time, the ‘memory’ of these less erasable changes accumulates preferentially, and the system increasingly adopts shapes that resemble those in its history where dissipation [of energy] occurred.”[2] With regards to life on Earth, this new formulation of the Second Law of thermodynamics requires that molecules in the primordial oceans take on more and more ordered forms that are better able to resonate with the ever-present driving energy of solar radiation. Structures of sufficient beauty and complexity to support life must eventually and inevitablyemerge, guided by a process that science has termed “dissipation driven adaptation.”[2] The essence of life, as Shah Kianfar has long taught, is therefore built into the natural laws of the universe. We are made manifest by the Mercy and Grace of Ar-Rahman in order to reveal and reflect the light of our provider into the world and take our place in the infinity of existence.
Works Cited:
[1] Callender, C. (2021, June 8). Thermodynamic asymmetry in time. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-thermo/
[2] England, J. L. (2015). Dissipative adaptation in driven self-assembly. Nature Nanotechnology, 10(11), 919–923. https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2015.250